Secrets of a real-life horse whisperer

BY JENNIFER SCALIA — If we conduct a collective check-in on how we relate to animals, some of Hollywood is a barometer. Birds, as in Hitchcock’s 1963 film with Tippi Hedren, may be feared. Rats (Willard) and snakes (Samuel Jackson) are to be loathed.

But horses, from Gladiator to Westerns to the Horse Whisperer, deserve our love.

I had never learned to ride a horse before doing healing work with this species that bred movie stars but I saw the Robert Redford movie and loved the book by Nicholas Evans — one of the few I could actually get myself to read back then.

That it may please thee to make wars to cease in all the world; to give to all nations unity, peace and concord; and to bestow freedom upon all peoples,

That it may please thee to visit the lonely; to strengthen all who suffer in mind, body, and spirit; and to comfort with presence those who are failing and infirm,

That it may please thee to forgive our enemies, persecutors and slanderers, and to turn their hearts,

You could be forgiven for thinking they’re from some kind of meditation on loving kindness in the Upanishads or the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

These lines of deep prayer are actually pulled from a very Christian prayer called The Great Litany that is performed in a communal chant. Just like Buddhists.

Acutely Buddhist in its appeal for universal compassion, The Great Litany was performed in procession by thousands of churches around the world to mark the First Sunday of Advent — the last Sunday of November in 2014 — the official beginning of the Christmas season for all of you chocolate fiends with Advent calendars, and Day One of a new church year.

Most of the gurus on Soul’s Code say that spirituality cannot be measured. But an economist would reply with two words: Ojai, California

BY PAUL KAIHLA — Ojai, CA is to spirituality what Silicon Valley is to technology. Due east and a 40-minute hop inland from Santa Barbara, Ojai has more mind-body spas per capita than anywhere else in the U.S. — probably, the world.

How to put the dynamic of hope into action. You have the same DNA as Gandhi, Václav Havel and Goenawan Mohamad

DAVID RICKEY — Hope is a great four-letter word, but it gets lost in the shuffle of our lives if it isn’t bonded with action.

Václav Havel, the first President of the Czech Republic, said ‘Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out’.

It is this certainty that allows — even emboldens us — to take action.

We have all faced survival uncertainty since the Great American Recession of 2008, and that uncertainty — can, and has — paralyzed some of us into in-action.

Our evolutionary origins lie in Africa. We share 98% of our DNA with chimps. A peak experience and political story about a chimp in Africa.

BY G. PASCAL ZACHARY — There’s a collective code that asks Christians to be their brother’s keeper. Buddhists go a step deeper, and embrace a first principle that we are not distinct entities at all but plot-points along a continuum of being called consciousness.

Well, I’m Jewish. And I’m a secular one at that. So a code that I go to is Darwin’s intersection with DNA.

We knew that we had a winning combination when we created Soul’s Code. How Hollywood is using the same words

BY SOUL’S CODE— In the spirit of Jungian synchronicity, are movie studios now mimicing our meme? Hundreds of millions have been invested in these feature films, and the producers branded them by using either the word “Soul” or “Code” in the titles — and on the cinema marquee:

What does the 44th President, his family and friends really believe in — that is, beyond politics?

BY SOUL’S CODE — Barack Obama is the personification of this site’s meme, “spiritual but not religious.”

On matter’s of faith, it’s what makes it so easy for pundits to spin his story from both the fundamentalist right and the agnostic left.

Exhibit: A documentary released during the 2012 presidential election cycle, 2016: Obama’s America (links to free streaming here), suggested that our 44th president is an anti-Christian, anti-colonialist.

From the left: Liberal comedian and million-dollar Obama donor, Bill Maher, routinely says he hopes the prez is lying when he espouses his Christian credentials.

Test your spiritual knowledge about our president by clicking on the multiple-choice answers below:

We say The Buddha, She says The Donald

Oprah has made a minor franchise out of what she calls an “Aha Moment.” In Oprah’s world, they’re the “unforgettable, connect-the-dots moments, when everything suddenly, somehow changed.”

If the phrase sounds like a cliché, that’s because it is. Oprah cribbed it from the German psychiatrist Karl Bühler, who actually coined the term 100 years ago. Oh!

Here are *real* Aha! Moments — from Ramana Maharshi to Byron Katie — that blow Oprah off the screen.

To Karl Bühler an Aha experience was “a peculiar, pleasure-oriented experience within the course of thought that pops up with the sudden insight into a previously intransparent context.”

A half century later, Abraham Maslow, the father of humanistic psychology, refined the idea with his definition of a Compare our examples to what passes for an Aha! Moment in Oprah’s magazine:

Donald Trump wanting to hit on his 3rd wife when they first met because she “she had an aristocratic, reserved air without being at all haughty.” The Donald’s apparent realization was “that even after you’ve done a lot of living, you can still be amazed by what can turn up in life.”

Despite my sudden shyness, I managed to give Melania every single one of my phone numbers. She seemed suspicious, which made me realize she was not only an incredible-looking woman but an intelligent one as well. She questioned me about each phone number: Business or personal? Limousine or bodyguard? I could tell she knew her stuff. I could also surmise that she knew who I was, and I remember deciding, Well, depending on her sources, that could work either for me or against me.

It was an incredibly difficult decision, and I needed a push. Fortunately, I got one. In March of that year, I went to New York City to join Billie Jean King at an event . . . We gathered at a local school, joined by dozens of young women athletes, all of us assembled on a stage beneath a giant banner that read dare to compete, the title of the film. A young woman named Sofia Totti, the captain of the girls’ basketball team at the school, introduced me.

And then something unexpected happened. As I approached the microphone to say a few words about the importance of giving girls every opportunity to grow and reach their potential, Sofia grabbed my hand and whispered in my ear: “Dare to compete, Mrs. Clinton,” she said. “Dare to compete.”

This is what stand-up comedians would call “great material.” They make jokes about whispering girls and Clintons. But we won’t